William's History Lesson

As I mentioned, I'm currently reading my way through Shakespeare's histories. Right now, I'm working through Richard III, which is the ninth of the ten for me (only King John is left after this). And other than the Queen Elizabeths and Henry VIII (who I had always assumed was preceded in some fashion by seven other King Henrys - it turns out that was a good guess), I had virtually no prior grasp of the history of the British monarchy. So I've been doing some online research to sort of fill in the blanks in helping me understand the whos and whens, at least as far as the plays are concerned.

This research has drastically improved my understanding of the surprising number of pop-culture references to the historical monarchs. Allow me to illustrate.

Here is the villainous Prince John as I've most recently encountered in the awesome BBC series Robin Hood. Well - spoiler alert - he goes on to become the King John whose play I'll be reading next. John's grandson, also an English king (though not the subject of any Shakespearean play), is none other than . . .


. . . Edward I, a.k.a. Edward Longshanks, a.k.a. the sadistic bad guy from the movie Braveheart - which was amazing if you've never seen it. My family still has a VHS copy - you know a movie is epic when it takes two VHS tapes to contain it. Anyway, I digress. Edward just happens to be the great-grandfather to a British king who is cool enough to have his own Shakespearean play, and that man is . . .


. . . Richard II. Richard, however, is not cool enough to keep his crown from being taken from him by Henry IV (who gets not one, but two plays). Cue some nasty business between the Houses of York and Lancaster (i.e. The War(s) of the Roses), flash forward almost one hundred years, during which there are six more kings, and then we finally come to . . .

. . . the prolific-marrying, church-schism-creating, wife-killing, Henry VIII. I knew him best from the first couple seasons my fiancee and I watched of the Showtime series The Tudors, which, like Shakespeare, didn't give Henry VII - Henry VIII's dad, the original Tudor monarch - a whole lot of airtime.

For me, it has been really cool to be able to connect all of these dots; and, in the process, to come to understand a number of things I have really enjoyed that much better.